I spent the last six months or so fighting and fighting and fighting to keep my W8 install stable. I have formerly used Ubuntu/Mint for my desktop (in my "I'm giving up gaming so I can FOCUS!" stages... which only ever last 3-6 weeks at best), but always went back. Now I'm actually at a point in my life where the vast majority of my gaming happens on the tabletop and the rest of my time is dedicated to work and education (going back to school after a two-year hiatus where I got myself together from the messy idiot I was - now I'm a somewhat clean idiot). The only games I really play anymore are strategy (Civ!) and currently D3 with my partner.

Anyway, I finally gave up when my W8 installation updates committed seppuku for the fifth time in three months and I started having to play peekaboo with my data HDD. I did some research, wanted to find a linux distro that would be lightweight, low footprint, and serve as a jump-point for me to learn a lot more about just about everything. I debated for a while between VL and Arch, but decided to go this route - the community and culture being pretty big pros for me.

So here I am, about as wet behind the ears as I can be, trying to learn what I can learn and contribute (eventually) where I can.

Thanks for the wealth of info, Wigums! I'm a pretty voracious reader with a break between reading materials, so I intend to be going through as much as I can over the next couple of weeks. I'm never afraid to ask the stupid questions - and I probably will ask a lot of questions as I go along - because I'd rather learn the answer than waffle about it in private.

Tackling my ATI drivers, then x86 libs/WINE on my VL64 install.

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“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” - HPMOR

BTW, VL does not provide multilib capabilities directly but alienbob's multilib packages do work with VL 7.0 64bit. You can install the multilib version of gcc and glibc at http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/VL64-7.0/multilib/ via gslapt/slapt-get (which is of course copied from alienbob) .

Wigums: It's more a matter of convincing her to let me have yet another toy that I will tinker on and play with until the sun comes up six nights a week. It only costing $200 USD brand new is definitely a selling point though... And (hopefully) I only have to fight the install battle once. I have been getting smarter with each attempt to use VL on my desktop, after all.

Sledgehammer: Absolutely! Three times over, yes, yes, and yes. I will probably be nixing the Chrome OS for myself (probably...), but I imagine it shouldn't be terribly hard to dual boot them. I really need a simple reliable portable machine for doing all my schoolwork - grabbing a cheap chromebook and putting VL on it seems an ideal solution.

Also note that all things are possible given enough frustrated energy and dedication.

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“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” - HPMOR

Sidenote: I finally managed to get VL64 7.0 and 7.1 installed on separate partitions on my box - and apparently 7.1 lost GLIBC_2.14 somehow and is now unuseable.

Luckily, I was able to log in once (with my partner watching) and cheer about how I had made a great step forward, etc etc. She didn't see it all go to the handbasket post-reboot. I have no idea (yet) what caused this. Digging as I go.

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“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” - HPMOR

The Arch wiki warns that entering developer mode will wipe all your data but I do not know if this includes the os or just saved data. If it is just saved data then entering dev mode so you can get to the legacy bios to get a boot menu will allow you to boot the usb port thus boot a usb linux, saving the installed system?

I read somewhere that there is no linux support for the mouse so you would have to use a usb mouse.

VL live does not offer persistance so saved data would not be possible via usb runs but a better test prior to install.